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An attempt of dialogue and a warning


Labranth

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~~snipped~~

 

Snipped your post and wrapped my response in spoilers for space.

 

 

And I'm going to stop you right there as well because now you're doing the same thing you're accusing me of doing, putting words into my mouth.

 

Nope. I did not once say that you said something that you did not say. You quoted my post to someone else, so are you admitting to also being Prapcaster and are posting from two accounts?

 

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In your original statement you said "And you know that they are new and casual players how? Oh, right, you assumed. Because only new and causal players could support streamlining of class abilities because they obviously can not figure out their class." thus insinuating there are more experienced people who are also having trouble. If you did not mean it to come off that way, okay fine i'll give you that one, but that's how it reads to me.

 

Again, you have that wrong. I never once made the assumption that anyone is having difficulty, can not learn their rotation, or any assumption about the people who are supporting this. That was done by you guys. You keep assuming that they must be having difficulty, that they can not learn a rotation, can not learn their class, etc. Perhaps you need to go back and reread Prapcaster's post that I quoted to find the origin of language that I used.

 

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Which again prompts the question, who are these people everyone keeps mentioning that are having a hard time with understanding their abilities? Who are these people? No one seems willing or able to name them, but are quick to hide behind them and try to bash folks like myself for not wanting to "streamline" the game for them.

 

I do not know. I did not bring them up. You guys keep bringing them up. Since you have mentioned them so many times in this one post perhaps it is you who should be answering that question, because I did not bring them up. I asked how does Prapcaster know that they are new or casual players who can not learn their rotation.

 

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You also try to tell me to "stop looking at this through a lens of "us vs them" yet here you are doing the same thing by referring to everyone else as naysayers because we dare give feedback that Bioware themselves asked for. If you want to think we don't have enough info yet, you're entitled to that opinion. However you having that opinion doesn't make it right.

 

I was not talking about feedback but the denigration of others, both new and casual players, and any who voice any opinion in opposition to you own. Now, here is every single one of my posts in this thread; not including this post, obviously. Find for me where I denigrated anyone, assumed that anyone in support of this is either new or casual, that anyone is having difficulty or can not learn their rotation / class, or voiced an opinion in support of these changes. And no, pulling out something that I was responding to in the post that I quoted does not count.

 

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Next you should take your own advice by reading what I said again, but slowly this time so you don't miss anything. Because now you're the one putting words in my mouth and displaying a woefully lacking understanding of context. Show me where I specifically said the information we have now is all they're ever going to release, because I would love to see that.

 

First, you will have to show me where I said that.

What I said:

This PTS build is not finished enough to make a firm judgement... I am waiting for the rest of the information to come out.

What you said:

As for the "let's wait and see because we don't have all the info yet" argument, how long do you intend to wait? Right now we have all the available information, which suggests this is a massive dumpster fire.

What I said:

As far as missing information. Saying "Right now we have all the available information" is like saying "I support the troops" or "We don't know what we don't know." These are truisms. Self evident truths. Of course we have all available information. Because this is all they have put out.

 

Nope, did not once say you said that this is all the information we are going to get. In fact, I said that I was awaiting the rest of the information. It is you who have decided to make a judgement based upon an incomplete narrative.

...but with all of the information available right now, it suggests a massive dumpster fire, which is why myself and other people are speaking out on this. Right now it doesn't look good, and we want to know where their minds are at and where they're going...

Yeah, like the rest of the information that they have not yet released. You are calling it a dumpster fire without that information, and all I said is I want to see that information first before I make a judgement. See what I mean about attacking anyone who posits a position contrary to your own?

 

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I needed a good laugh dude and you delivered on this one. Do you really not understand what a generalized statement is, or did you just rush so quickly to get a reply out that you completely missed what was said? Show me specifically where I said Blade Blitz or where I said Saber Reflect, because I would love to see that. What I said was: "If I have 10 abilities, you steal 5 from me, then give 2 of them back, I'm still losing 3 abilities I've had since launch." Show me anywhere in that statement that I named a specific ability, because you won't find it. Now who's operating on faulty assumptions and putting words into other's mouths.

 

And you are just trying to parse your words to support your faulty argument.

 

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Again I was there when we went to disciplines and they dropped the massive mega skill trees. If you think the big mega skill trees didn't have cookie cutter builds, you're kidding yourself. They were far far worse for cookie cutter builds than the Disciplines have ever been. I can't tell you the number of people I saw pass up on core abilities they were meant to have, just for some minor passive that is nothing. This is why most games have abandoned large skill trees as they don't provide much in the way of meaningful choice. Cool you got another passive you'll never see, cool you leveled up and got a 2nd passive you'll never seen, then a 3rd, then a 4th, then a 5th, then oh man we finally got an actual active ability we can see. While some passive abilities are necessary for a system like that, most of them were abilities that you placed points into and forgot about their existence.

 

Never played D&D or a PnP RPG then, hmm? DDO certainly has not moved away from expansive skill trees. In fact, they have more now than ever before and are adding a new one soon. And your whataboutism is pointless. Of course there were cookie cutter builds with the skill trees. There will always be cookie cutter builds. The different is that under the old skill trees we had some choice in how we built our character. In what abilities or passives we took. Since moving to Disciplines all that went away. All characters are the same, the same abilities, the same passives, the same exact rotation save for the few choices in Utilities. My point was two fold. Firstly that BW has revamped the abilities system before completely diverting from what we had before. Did people grumble then. Yep. Most do not like change and will struggle against it as long as possible. Second, the whole, but we have had this since launch, argument is irrelevant because BW has revamped the abilities system before, maked changes, added abilities, removed abilities, changed, added, and removed passives. Offer some constructive feedback and then either adapt or move on. Drop the attacks on others just because they do not agree with you.

 

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Even then your emotion based arguments don't answer the question of why folks feel such potentially massive nerfs are needed to start with. You should take your own advise about now putting words into other people's mouths before you speak again.

 

My final thought, and final reply to you, is this: "you should take your own advice by reading what I said again, but slowly this time so you don't miss anything."

And let me stop you before you start in on your red herring ad hominems. I neither support no[r] disagree with these changes. This PTS build is not finished enough to make a firm judgement. I do think there are some problems, but I also think that there are a number of interesting possibilities. I am waiting for the rest of the information to come out.

 

I bolded a few parts to ensure that you did not miss them this time.

 

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Sorry to say but the people in this thread saying there's too many abilities most likely don't do ranked or anything in pve harder then story mode. If you want this game to be more casual just say that. But don't scream at people because of your own inability to learn to keybind and learn your class.

 

This is essentially what it boils down to. "I waste hundreds of dollars on the cartel market and play story mode ops. I'm what Disney cares about. No one cares about your stupid NiM ops and pvp. I can't keep track of all these buttons, so everyone should have them taken away." These corporate simps wouldn't know challenging gameplay if it bashed them in the face.

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Oh stop flailing.

 

The current system has too many abilites and the glut is daunting for new players.

 

Besides the "complexity" of the current system is nothing more than filling up 4-5 toolbars with some "rotation' someone posted online and then pushing the buttons in order while moving. There is nothing so super sacred or complex about that - just CUMBERSOME.

 

The key here of course is delivery - and if people think BioWare can't deliver, well, I won't argue because they are the KINGS of overpromising and under-delivering.

 

But if they can make each loadout (NOT ADVANCED CLASS - LOAD OUT) feel like a unique and viable play style, even with 1/3 of the abilities, then frankly THAT is a winner. After all, remember we are promised loadout swapping, so no ability is going to be truly gone.

 

The keys here are this:

 

  • Will Bioware actually put in the work to make each loadout feel unique?
  • Will they rebalance the abilities in each loadout to make sure all loadouts are effective in whatever it is they are designed to do for endgame?

 

If they do those 2 things, the game will be fine, despite your flouncing.

 

If they decide to take the lazy road and make it so that every advanced class is what's different, and the "loadouts" are the same other than 1-2 token different abilities (what's on PTS now with Jedi Guardian), then yes, this will be a flaming disaster and frankly utterly pointless since it will still be too similar to what we have now.

 

But they have the framework to do this thing for real there. So lets see if they have the work ethic and the foresight to ignore the flouncers and take this game where it really needs to go to modernize it for 2021....

 

I love these heavyrp players, who see more abilities than 5 and already start to complain like "this is too difficult and hard to memorize bla bla". If you cant handle it, put less abilities to the hotbar, you can still play all your story content pressing 1 or 2 buttons. But let the ranked pvpers and nim ops players have the challenge to use more abilities like now. Yes, there are some abilites that are not too important and if BW remove them will not have much impact on the gameplay, but thats only 1-3 ability per class, not more. Sadly I cant trust BW to realize what ability is important and what is not. For example: Force Clarity which was added 6.0 to the Jedi Knight is at first glance not a very important ability. It just gives more dmg for the next direct single target melee attack. BUT with the Decent of the Fearless set bonus it gives a plus enjoyment factor to the rotation. So it would be foolish to remove. Maybe remove it when you spec your Guardian to tank, cuz you won't use that set bonus unless you want to skank tank.

Edited by Frodesz
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This is the longest no u thread I've ever read

 

Anakin: "What have I done?"

 

So, I ask again, what do you consider essential abilities? Note, abilities, not Utilities that augment those abilities because we do not have details about those.

 

Essential means important, central, vital. Like roly poly for Operative/Scoundrel or Phase Walk for Sorc. Juggernaut/Guardian is not my main, although I have both of them as alts. I do not possess extensive terminology and deep knowledge to actually argue with you in the field of Guardian/Juggernaut skills, but I do possess common sense to see that they want to prune down every class and that Guardian is simply the beginning.

 

I love these heavyrp players, who see more abilities than 5 and already start to complain like "this is too difficult and hard to memorize bla bla". If you cant handle it, put less abilities to the hotbar, you can still play all your story content pressing 1 or 2 buttons. But let the ranked pvpers and nim ops players have the challenge to use more abilities like now.

 

And that is the problem. They're either too tired of SWTOR or simply want to appeal to said "heavyrp players" who want to press 5 buttons. They would be better off if they would create some "levels of difficulty" for players. Like if you want to play story only, here's the layout for 8 buttons. You want to clean FPs and veteran content - here's the pruned down version of your character (this even sounds stupid but okay). And if you want to participate in NiM and ranked PvP - here's "above average" layout with all the skills and utilies.

By actually scrapping all other layers of player base except for roleplayers, they do a big no no and SWTOR can repeat the fate of Star Wars Galaxies and WoW.

Edited by Labranth
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For the "ability bloat" people I'm a bit curious. Swtor is a tab target mmorpg it's engagement comes from pressing a keybind on a 1.5 gcd (global cool down) this is how you interact with the world. Most animations and move are stale and generic with particle effect on them, essentially what you are asking for is less engagement. Combat won't magically get better from less abilities to press. You now just have less to do while looking at the same stale generic animation only with less variety now. In games like BDO less is good. It's flashy and satisfying and most abilities change on multiple key presses which adds more depth to its combat. Asking for less is a tab target mmo does not improve it's gameplay, IMO.

 

Maybe it's just me but in a tab target mmorpg I'd rather have 30 keybinds that do unique things then 15 that combine multiple things into one ability. It takes away the strategic choice of the encounters. It reminds me of the one button macros from Rift it was silly you could macro almost an entire rotation into one button in that game. You could macro a stun/snare/execute into one button and take the thought of having to use them strategically. that made pvp a mess and pve was 2-3 button mashing.

 

Going to end here before thing get awkward but I am genuinely curious why having less abilities in a tab target game is good to some even if the abilities are niche they are there to offer player engagements in unique situations.

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For the "ability bloat" people I'm a bit curious. Swtor is a tab target mmorpg it's engagement comes from pressing a keybind on a 1.5 gcd (global cool down) this is how you interact with the world. Most animations and move are stale and generic with particle effect on them, essentially what you are asking for is less engagement. Combat won't magically get better from less abilities to press. You now just have less to do while looking at the same stale generic animation only with less variety now. In games like BDO less is good. It's flashy and satisfying and most abilities change on multiple key presses which adds more depth to its combat. Asking for less is a tab target mmo does not improve it's gameplay, IMO.

 

Maybe it's just me but in a tab target mmorpg I'd rather have 30 keybinds that do unique things then 15 that combine multiple things into one ability. It takes away the strategic choice of the encounters. It reminds me of the one button macros from Rift it was silly you could macro almost an entire rotation into one button in that game. You could macro a stun/snare/execute into one button and take the thought of having to use them strategically. that made pvp a mess and pve was 2-3 button mashing.

 

Going to end here before thing get awkward but I am genuinely curious why having less abilities in a tab target game is good to some even if the abilities are niche they are there to offer player engagements in unique situations.

It boils down to people wanting this game to be something it is not, and most of the people left playing at endgame are probably still playing because SW/combat, not because the 6 months to a year drip feed of story.

 

I guess time will tell if losing one type of costumer is worth attracting another, given that this game is 10 years old and it already has a certain rep in the internet you can take a guess what I think (if anything they should've done this before releasing on steam), but feels like a monumental undertaking for the small chance of getting a new player boost.

 

Also I'd like to point out that this game's combat is incredibly scalable to player interest/ability, for better or worse if you just wanna play story you can do so very easily now and if you wanna learn your class to the fullest for harder content you can, it's a lot more rewarding than the 5 to 10 button mmo's I've played after swtor imo, none of them managed to "get me hooked" like swtor has, given that most mmo stories arent even that interesting to begin with always having something new to learn feels waayy better than all classes having the same type of 5 abilities with different icons.

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Maybe it's just me but in a tab target mmorpg I'd rather have 30 keybinds that do unique things then 15 that combine multiple things into one ability. It takes away the strategic choice of the encounters. It reminds me of the one button macros from Rift it was silly you could macro almost an entire rotation into one button in that game. You could macro a stun/snare/execute into one button and take the thought of having to use them strategically. that made pvp a mess and pve was 2-3 button mashing.

 

PvP in TOR is a mess at any rate, mostly because of the amount of CC that makes it incredibly un-fun for players who know their class, but cannot press buttons fast enough to counter debuffs. Doubly so because ranked is so closed off that most people that are left are those that actually are highly proficient in the current system, and will focus kill any new player that appears. You don't have enough defensive utilities to deal with focused CC from multiple players, even if you are a veteran yourself; you simply can manage to make yourself enough of a nuisance for that to not be effective.

 

And some of those abilities are simply not fun. Take Furious Power/Force Clarity. A toon with full Descent of Fearless should basically always press that button as soon as new charge appears, because that's the best way to keep 10% damage buff. Many defensive abilities basically do the same thing, being panic buttons. There are enough of them in the game that a skilled player can, without much difficulty, run 4 man MM flashpoints by themself. Do you believe that to be working as intended?

 

I would rather have 20 abilities that are substantially different from one another, and have different applications, than 30 in which some are basically duplicates. And yes, I would be in favour of vastly reducing the number of CC abilities in PvP meta, which, in my opinion, are the biggest drain of fun factor from PvP right now.

Edited by CzarnyKolor
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PvP in TOR is a mess at any rate, mostly because of the amount of CC that makes it incredibly un-fun for players who know their class, but cannot press buttons fast enough to counter debuffs. Doubly so because ranked is so closed off that most people that are left are those that actually are highly proficient in the current system, and will focus kill any new player that appears. You don't have enough defensive utilities to deal with focused CC from multiple players, even if you are a veteran yourself; you simply can manage to make yourself enough of a nuisance for that to not be effective....

 

I would rather have 20 abilities that are substantially different from one another, and have different applications, than 30 in which some are basically duplicates. And yes, I would be in favour of vastly reducing the number of CC abilities in PvP meta, which, in my opinion, are the biggest drain of fun factor from PvP right now.

 

The CC/stun problem in the PVP part of SWTOR has existed since 1.0. The game has evolved since then, but this isn't a new problem, if you want to think of it as one. It's simply what SWTOR PVP has always been, first in 8v8s, then in arenas and ranked, though in different ways.

 

The problem with preferring 20 abilities or whatever number over what the game currently has for a class like Guardian is SWTOR is now almost 10 years old. The game's content was overwhelmingly designed around classes with a full spectrum of abilities. 4.0 changed the leveling story such that you could use your basic attack or general AOE with a healing companion and never have a problem, but all other parts of the game revolve around the abilities players have grown accustomed to.

 

To change classes so drastically now involves going back and redesigning all the FPs, Ops, chapters, and even some solo content to still be engaging. I keep seeing NiM and ranked being the standard mentioned, but this hits much more casual parts of the game, like Vet FPs, heroics, and activities people do for Conquest each week.

 

And that's a very obvious problem, with the kind of resources and staffing this game has had for 4-5 years now. It simply is not believable that BW can redesign the entire game, PVE and PVP, to fit with simplified classes.

 

This also doesn't address how many bugs will be created in the process of changing classes and trying to retrofit content to work with them. We are all familiar with how BW handles bugs for a long time now, with reduced resources and/or staff. Do you honestly think they can change combat, the entire game to accommodate said changes, and fix even most of the worst bugs that hit the live servers? All the rest just become things players will have to learn to live with.

 

The smallest story or FP updates currently create problems such that they can't be fixed sometimes. Even CM items, which get the highest priority typically, don't always get a fix.

 

Several guildmates were discussing these changes, and one of the few things that made sense to us is EA/BW is trying to figure out a way to keep making a certain amount of money off of SWTOR without making much new playable content, and maybe this involves non-PC platforms in the future. They can sell all the old CM items again, possibly to mostly different players, and not really have to make much of anything new for updates, or nothing at all after a certain point in the future. Perhaps fewer and fewer veteran subscribers are generating enough of a profit, and the Steam launch gave them ideas on how to sell the game again, the vast, vast majority of which is in its past, to a different audience.

 

The changes certainly don't seem to be aimed at improving the game experience for current subscribers. That would generally involve making more significant content updates, increasing the frequency of updates, and fixing longstanding bugs, alongside making more performance/engine and graphics improvements.

 

These haven't generally been a feature of subscribing to SWTOR since around when 5.0 launched, and it was clear the KotFE chapter model didn't work. Arguably, it was true for 4.0/KotFE as well, when many multiplayer-focused subscribers quit the game due to no new FPs or Ops. In other words, BW has gone about keeping the game going without much content or other more costly investments for a long time with current players, and perhaps they're betting on making future income off of a mostly different pool of players instead.

 

Whoever ends up sticking around due to Star Wars or whatever other reason that is in the current subscriber base is just extra revenue, and, for the most part, not the target audience.

 

This makes some sense to me, but we'll see what happens between now and 7.0. I certainly hope this is completely wrong.

Edited by arunav
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